Meta-Learning for Color-to-Infrared Cross-Modal Style Transfer

Evelyn A. Stump, Francesco Luzi, Leslie M. Collins, Jordan M. Malof; Proceedings of the Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV), 2025, pp. 5460-5469

Recent object detection models for infrared (IR) imagery are based upon deep neural networks (DNNs) and require large amounts of labeled training imagery. However publicly available datasets that can be used for such training are limited in their size and diversity. To address this problem we explore cross-modal style transfer (CMST) to leverage large and diverse color imagery datasets so that they can be used to train DNN-based IR image-based object detectors. We evaluate six contemporary stylization methods on four publicly-available IR datasets - the first comparison of its kind - and find that CMST is highly effective for DNN-based detectors. Surprisingly we find that existing data-driven methods are outperformed by a simple grayscale stylization (an average of the color channels). Our analysis reveals that existing data-driven methods are either too simplistic or introduce significant artifacts into the imagery. To overcome these limitations we propose meta-learning style transfer (MLST) which learns a stylization by composing and tuning well-behaved analytic functions. We find that MLST leads to more complex stylizations without introducing significant image artifacts and achieves the best overall detector performance on our benchmark datasets.